Election Polls, Free Trade, and the Stock Market: Evidence from the Canadian General Election

NBER Working Paper No. 3073Issued in August 1989NBER Program(s): MEITIIFM

This paper examines the relationship between the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) and election polls during the 1988 Canadian General Election campaign. Two hypotheses are investigated: first, did polls influence the TSE, and secondly, if so, did the nature of the influence suggest that investors were reacting to expectations concerning the effect of the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA)? I find that the TSE was positively related to Conservative popularity as measured by polls, but that the differential movement of TSE subindices does not offer additional support to an FTA based interpretation of events.